Skiing Needs a Surfline for Mountain Conditions

Photo: Ariel Zambelich/Wired

The snow industry needs help.

This has nothing to do with the hardware you strap to your feet. On the contrary — the hard goods scene in snowboarding and skiing is incredibly vibrant and exciting. No, the problem with the snow industry is its lousy relationship with the internet, and the world of surfing could hold the answer.

We’re in sore need of a single service that accurately and consistently reports snow conditions across multiple resorts. What the industry — and more importantly, the community — needs to do is take a page from the surfing world. It needs a Surfline for snow reports.

Say you’re trying to decide which mountain to hit tomorrow. Pull up nearly any resort’s website and you’d be hard-pressed to find any truly detailed information. The level of info they make available is akin to what we’d get in the 1980s whenever we’d wake up at the crack of dawn and call the resort’s conditions hotline to hear the recorded message. Resort websites usually just report the same rudimentary things: the weather, which lifts are turning, amount of snow in the past 24 hours, and the general condition of the runs. The only real difference is that the information is presented on a beautifully designed website, next to lift ticket prices and photos of families skiing in the deepest powder you’ve ever seen.

For a sport where the conditions can vary wildly from day to day — and even from hour to hour — a resort’s homepage should be as dynamic as its Twitter and Facebook feed.

Sure, webcams now accompany those stats, but most cams are placed at the top of a run — or worse, at the base of the resort. Watching people get on or off a chair lift tells you nothing about the conditions on the runs those lifts serve.

If you want details, you’re better off turning to Twitter and Facebook, where most resorts maintain accounts. You can get chair conditions, photos of actual runs, and videos of the best skiers on the mountain blasting trough powder. All this stuff shows up on social networks, and the fans and followers (people just like you) comment and add their own observations in real time. It’s real information, served up on platters of glistening snow with an extra helping of “Don’t you wish you were here?”

Sure, there are independent apps available that give you the latest conditions from the resorts, like SnoCru, North Face’s Snow Report and Ski and Snow Report. They’re great, but they aren’t as centralized or comprehensive as Surfline’s massive, crowdsourced service.

Besides, shouldn’t all that information you can cull from apps and social channels be presented clearly on the resort’s main webpage? For a sport where the conditions can vary wildly from day to day — and even from hour to hour — a resort’s homepage should be as dynamic as its Twitter and Facebook feeds. Even when the stars align and a resort is smart about incorporating social media, you run into the problem of a resort exaggerating the current conditions by dropping the word “powder” into report — even if they only received an inch of new snow. Poor form, and they risk losing our business by playing dirty tricks.

I’m telling you: The Surfline model is the way to go.

For the first 10 years, Surfline was an over-the-phone conditions service. Unlike the ski resorts’ hotine, however, Surfline’s information was relayed via actual surfers reporting on their home break. In 1995, the service launched Surfline.com, and those individual reports were accompanied by webcams of the actual surf breaks.

Want to see the break at Huntington Beach pier? A quick trip to Surfline shows the current conditions, a forecast of swell conditions over the next 14 days, a live video of the waves and, more importantly, a shot of the crowd in the line-up. The site offers limited live information and forecasts for free. For $70 a year, surfers can stare at live uninterrupted video of waves all day if they want. If you’re an avid surfer, the monthly expense of $5.83 is well worth it.

But the idea of resorts banding together to create a single stream that presents current, dynamic conditions so riders can decide which resort gets all their money today? That’s a pipe dream. Resorts are businesses, and its unlikely they’ll cooperate to send paying customers to different hills on different days.

Instead, like Surfline, an independent business would have to be formed. Finding people at each resort to report on daily and hourly conditions should be no problem. Most skiers have at least one friend who rides nearly every day. That friend usually spends their mornings researching weather conditions and how those conditions will affect local resorts. Why not give those folks a regular paycheck and a place to share that information with other like-minded individuals? Thanks to smartphones, videos and photos could be uploaded and presented in one place, all within minutes.

Tracking snow and mountain conditions is something resorts have been doing for years. But the industry needs to advance the depth of information being shared with skiers. Like other industries, it may be up to the community to solve that particular problem.